NCCPR in The Imprint: Flexibility Could Help Family First. More Foster Care Funding Will Make the Whole System Worse.

Ten years ago, when the bill that would become the Family First Prevention Services Act was introduced, I wrote a column for this publication headlined: “Family First Act Institutionalizes Institutions, Sets Up Prevention to Fail.”  

Among the many problems: The onerous process of proving prevention programs were “evidence-based” and the fact that the bill would not fund the kind of concrete help families really need. So I offered a prediction: …

Read the full column in The Imprint

The real “oomph” deficit in Santa Clara County

U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio just taught a master class in how to
deal with bullies. I hope they will take note of it in Santa Clara County.

So far, no one will stand up to the bullies driving the nation’s worst foster-care panic and endangering children’s lives.

Let’s start with a pop quiz. 

A state report alleges that, as the San Jose Mercury News puts it: 

Santa Clara County’s child welfare agency placed vulnerable children in foster homes before completing required safety checks and repeatedly failed to document whether other checks had occurred, a state investigation released Thursday found. 

Here’s the quiz: What is the most likely cause? A.   

A. Leadership has failed to create a “culture of safety.”

B.    Top management lacks “concern for the most needy children in the county,” but the state doesn’t have enough “oomph” to call them out.

C.    Some of the very people offering up and promoting answers A and B helped trigger and escalate a foster care panic so severe that the county has nearly tripled the number of children thrown into foster care, and court cases have skyrocketed even more.  Simultaneously deluged with all those additional children and no place to put them, overwhelmed workers cut corners on safety checks and/or documenting safety checks.

The obvious answer is C. But, of course, since that would implicate The Mercury News, and in particular reporter Julia Prodis Sulek, it’s not offered as an option to readers. (To which The Mercury News almost certainly would respond: We did one story that mentions that there might be a panic, so we never need to mention it again!) 

The state did not investigate the agency; it investigated the agency’s file cabinets. The investigators spoke to no one. So the report’s findings can mean anything from a failure to do something to a failure to properly file the paperwork after doing something. Odds are, there is some of each. But failure to record what’s been done is itself a critical failure. The limits of the report should not obscure its seriousness. 

And for now, let’s assume worst case, assume all the failures are failure to act, that some of those omissions may endanger children - and then ask why it might happen. Rather than examine their own behavior, we get this from some of those who started and continue to foment the panic: 

There’s County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, who orchestrated and reveled in the public humiliation of Damion Wright, who then led the County Department of Family and Children’s Services. Her behavior would be outrageous and unprofessional directed at anyone. But when she seemed to so enjoy humiliating one of the few Black men to hold a high-level position in Santa Clara County government, it “raises questions,” as journalists like to say, about racial bias. After Wright resigned, Arenas settled for merely driving his white successor to tears. 

Sulek chronicled both acts of humiliation with apparent glee, declaring the first “an epic takedown,” while her editors promoted the second with a huge photo of the agency head in tears. 

So it’s no surprise that when the latest report came out, Arenas rushed to put out a statement declaring that the state once again 

is telling our social services agency that it is failing to keep kids safe. While I’m confident the agency will adopt the new recommendations, we need leadership from the top to establish a culture of safety. 

If  Sulek contacted any of the other supervisors, there is no indication of it in the story. 

Then there’s Sulek’s ever-reliable Mr. Insta-quote, Steve “remember-I’m-just-speaking-for-myself” Baron, a member of the county’s Child Abuse Prevention Council, who tells us: 

“The deficiencies and noncompliance with legal requirements have probably been occurring for many many years, but have only been identified and revealed because children have died.” 

But, as I’ll get to in a moment, the basic premise of the comment is false. 

Perhaps finding these comments insufficiently inflammatory, Sulek turned to Jeoffry Gordon, a retired family doctor from San Diego. I’ve encountered Dr. Gordon before. He got very upset with this column I wrote for CalMatters. A more detailed discussion of Dr. Gordon's views, some of which are alarmingly extreme,  is available here, though the comments on the underlying website seem to have been taken down. 

So I can't say it was a surprise when, with Gordon, Sulek hit the jackpot: 

“When tragedies happen, such as started with Baby Phoenix, and they keep happening, and after three years you have just as many deficiencies, something’s terribly wrong in resources and management,” said Dr. Jeoffry Gordon, a member of the state-mandated citizens review panel that evaluates child fatality cases. “It borders on the scandalous.” … [Emphasis added.] 

“Nobody expects you to be perfect, but this enumeration of deficiencies speaks to me that the leadership and direction and concern for the most needy children is still deficient in the county,” Gordon said, and the state “does not seem to have the oomph to directly call that out.” 

“You have to look higher up the chain of command into the responsible parties that have not provided the resources, training, direction, or enthusiasm to protect the county’s children.” 

So apparently Gordon somehow got it into his head that no child ever died of child abuse in Santa Clara County until the death of Baby Phoenix. (Even harder to explain is why Steve Baron seems under the same misimpression.) 

Granted, if one gets one’s information only from the Mercury News, one can be left with that impression, but someone who serves on the panel Gordon is on should have at least thought to check. Of course, it’s not true. Tragically, children died in Santa Clara County long before the county tried to do more to keep families together, and they continue to die even as the county rushes to tear apart families at a frantic pace – perhaps sometimes even because the county rushes to tear apart families at a frantic pace. 

Researchers even have developed a formula to predict how many more Santa Clara County children will die or become seriously ill because of the foster-care panic. 

The child abuse deaths Gordon and Baron cite are not because of some particular failing in Santa Clara County. It’s true of every county of Santa Clara’s size, and many counties that are much smaller. In no county or state has a foster-care panic made that any better; the panics only divert us from focusing on real solutions with potential to reduce such fatalities. 

Recall the massive study showing no link between increasing removals of children and reducing child abuse deaths, or vice versa.

Or recall the comment of a staunch defender of foster care, Prof. Jill Duerr Berrick, who, at a meeting last month, told Arenas (who desperately didn’t want to hear it) and her fellow supervisors that it’s impossible to draw sweeping systemic conclusions based on fatalities because they are “outlier events, that are unpredictable and rare.” 

One would think Gordon would know that. Instead, he bases his attack on people who, agree with them or not, have some of the hardest jobs in government, by doing exactly what Berrick says you can’t do. He concludes that the fact that children known to the system sometimes die proves there is a lack of  “concern for the most needy children” and a lack of “enthusiasm” for helping them on the part of county agency leaders. It’s exactly the kind of personal attack that Arenas and Sulek seem to love. 

Gordon may not have known about the research or what Berrick said, but Sulek sure did. She was in the room when the research was cited and when Berrick made her comment. But she left that comment out of her story. 

But Gordon said what Julia Prodis Sulek wanted to hear. At the Mercury News, it seems nothing else matters. How might one describe that approach to journalism? I’d say it borders on the scandalous. 

Equally obscene was the way Sulek linked the report to the death of Jaxon Juarez; neglecting to note the distinct possibility that Jaxon was a casualty of the foster-care panic. 

What the report said 

Now, let's consider the report itself, the product of an investigation by the California Department of Social Services. The report was requested by the County Social Services Agency itself, something the Mercury News neglects to mention. And oddly, given that this is the 21^st Century and a newspaper in Silicon Valley should know how to do this, there is no link to the report itself. (So I’ve uploaded it here.) 

Perhaps that’s because, though the report does indeed paint a deeply disturbing picture, there also are things in it the Mercury News would rather you not know, or at least wants to play down. Mentioned only briefly far down in the story is the fact that, among the cases they examined, the state investigators found none in which the county left a child in danger. 

The report also revealed some strengths among frontline workers under siege. From the report: 

● .. .[T]he review team observed a notable strength in the county’s informal safety assessment and contact documentation that occurred during supervised visitation between the parents and youth. 

The depth and detail of supervised visit contact notes provided significant insight into the parent-child relationship and had the capacity to informally identify supplemental safety and/or case plan concerns that may not be identified during a monthly social worker visit. 

● For youth placed out of county, DFCS almost always continued conducting monthly social worker contacts with the youth, not relying on the placement county for courtesy social worker visits. … 

(This is particularly impressive given that still another harm to children caused by the panic is that so many have to be placed far from Santa Clara County.) 

The report also says: 

● When documentation was present to make a determination, the onsite team did not identify any caregivers with non-exemptible offenses in which youth were still placed in the home, supporting the county’s adherence to this requirement. 

● When present, emergency placement home evaluation contact narratives … provided high-quality documentation of the initial in-home inspection. In these cases, the evaluation included identified actions needed to remediate any deficiencies. 

But note how these two strengths have to be qualified with “when documentation was present.” That means even a best-case reading of the report makes clear there’s a lot of work to be done.  But that can’t happen if the Supervisors continue to let the foster-care panic rage out of control. 

Because Godon is right about one thing: There is an oomph deficit in Santa Clara County. At base, Sulek and Arenas are bullies. And so far, no one’s had the oomph to push back. 

So far, there’s been no equivalent of U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio. She’s an ex-officio member of the Board of the Kennedy Center. She had to face the ultimate bully. But here’s what happened when Donald Trump tried to bully her: 

It was the most unprofessional thing that I've ever witnessed or been a part of. He went into name calling from everything, from trying to say that I was an obstructionist. I was dumb, he said, 'I think you're incompetent.' And I said, 'I know you're incompetent.' … 

And I looked to the chair …  and I said, are we really going to do this? This is unprofessional. But I was not going to let him call me awful things. And he said he was going to hold me responsible if something fell out of the ceiling and killed someone. And I told him, I said, you're already killing people. We're at war. 

We also have people who are starving. You're doing this. And then he wanted to talk about how great he was with developing,  … I reminded him that he had more bankruptcies than anybody in the room. … I mean, it really went there because … I was not going to let him bully me, intimidate me, and the facts stand for themselves. 

Now that’s what I call oomph.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending September 15, 2026

● The Tampa Bay Times reports that local and state advocates are demanding answers after the Times’ expose of the enormous scope and harm of hidden foster care in the region. From the story: 

[R]epresentatives from The Spring of Tampa Bay — which serves domestic violence survivors — said many of their clients had felt pressured into handing their children over to relatives. The Spring of Tampa Bay attorneys cited “grave concerns” that parents weren’t given a chance to get their own lawyers and struggled to get information about their cases and their rights.

● In The Washington Post, Lenore Skenazy, president of Let Grow, writes about the mother who was arrested – and convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor – for letting her five-year-old walk to a pond alone. She notes that surveys reveal that 

today’s high school freshmen have a fraction of the freedom that used to be given to first-graders. It’s little wonder they’re so anxious. 

In this week’s reminder that the horror stories go in all directions: 

● WFIE-TV in Evansville, Indiana, has a story about that case in which a mother’s three-year-old with major medical needs was taken from her because she let her 14-year-old babysit another of her children overnight. The foster parents allegedly did not know how to care for the three-year-old, contributing to his death. 

● From The Baltimore Sun concerning a child from Washington, DC placed in neighboring Prince George’s County, Maryland: 

The medical examiner’s office has ruled the death of a 14-month-old foster boy a homicide after a caregiver in Prince George’s County failed to seek medical attention when he fell ill, later dying of dehydration. 

The county’s State’s Attorney’s Office said it continues to investigate the Feb. 9 death of Dereon Kai Booze for possible criminal charges. …

 

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending September 10, 2026

● Two years after one sensation-seeking member of the Board of Supervisors and one Pulitzer-sniffing journalist for the San Jose Mercury News in Santa Clara County set off the worst foster-care panic anywhere in America in decades, the other members of the Board are starting to wonder if they did the right thing. They brought in a panel of state and national experts for a study session. As The Imprint reports, they made clear the answer is no. The Mercury News also eventually published a story. I have a blog post about that one. 

● The Tampa Bay Times follows up on its outstanding expose of the enormous harm of hidden foster care. Among other results, a Florida member of Congress will now cosponsor a bill that would require states to at least keep track of – and disclose – how many children they place in hidden foster care. 

● Also in Florida: I don’t know if the underlying decision to remove the child in the case I write about here was right, though there is strong cause to doubt it. I do know that everything else the Florida Department of Children and Families did was wrong – and probably far more common than the agency will ever admit. See especially the bodycam video revealing the appalling behavior of caseworkers. 

● As the time approaches for Minnesota to implement a law requiring county family police agencies to do more to keep families together, it seems the state and the counties have spent more time whining about the law than preparing for it. The Imprint reports that “an advisory council has issued a report saying the state lacks the ability to assess” whether the law is working. 

“Whether the law fulfills that promise will not be determined by its enactment,’’ its authors wrote. “It will be determined by whether Minnesota builds the standards, services, authority, accountability, and enduring infrastructure necessary to make its protections real in families’ lives.” 

● The Davis Vanguard offers an excellent overview of the confusion of poverty with neglect. From the story:

Consider a family facing eviction because it cannot pay several thousand dollars in back rent. 

One possible government response is to allow the family to lose its housing, investigate the parents because their children no longer have stable shelter, remove the children, pay foster parents or residential providers, assign caseworkers, appoint attorneys and require parents to complete a series of services before reunification. 

Another possibility is to prevent the eviction. 

● And in Georgia, the Albany Herald compares two counties with starkly different rates of taking away children – and starkly different rates of poverty. 

● Also in Georgia: The persecution of a mother who, exhausted and living in a shelter for battered women, accidentally left one of her children in a hot car where he died, continues. Her surviving children suffer most. Former Washington Post reporter and editor Gene Weingarten, who has been following the case on his Substack, has an update.

● And still in Georgia: The state family police agency has an $81 million deficit. Wait ‘till you see where some of the money went, as reported by The Center Square.

● In The Imprint, Ruth White, executive director of the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare, and a member of the NCCPR Board of Directors, writes about the “vexing admixture of learned helplessness, paternalism and institutional parochialism among the professional class” that prevents youth aging out of foster care from getting the housing benefits to which they are entitled and which are readily available under a federal program. (It’s an excellent program regardless of who insisted on slapping her name on it.) 

● Virginia has a “reasonable childhood independence” law. But when have mere laws stopped the family police? Lenore Skenazy writes in Reason about what happened to one mother in Virginia who gave her child reasonable childhood independence. See also this story about the case from The Washington Post. 

● Some better news from Virginia: In that state, the law was unclear about whether, if pregnant women were taking prescribed medication to treat opioid use disorder, mandated reporters still had to turn them in to the family police. In the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Robert Melvin of the R Street Institute praises lawmakers for passing legislation clarifying that the answer is no. 

For pregnant women receiving medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD), like methadone or buprenorphine, clear health guidance is critical. They need to be able to talk frankly with their doctors about their situation without triggering a mandatory-reporting call to CPS. That fear is the biggest impediment, which is why Virginia’s approach is so important. 

In this week’s reminder that the horror stories go in all directions: 

● If the allegations in the lawsuit that is the topic of this story from WEHT-TV are true, Indiana’s hair trigger for tearing apart families may have cost a three-year-old boy his life. 

In March, 2022, Leon Morrero was born with medical issues so complex that his mother, Nicole, had to complete three months of medical training before her son could be released from the hospital. More than three years later, his mother brought him to the hospital for more treatment. 

As the story explains: 

Nicole reportedly spent time with Leon daily, while balancing the needs of her other children. 

On September 21, a release says Nicole went to the hospital to visit Leon, leaving her other child in the care of her 14-year-year-old daughter to babysit. Nicole then went to dinner with a friend and fell asleep at the friend’s house. 

The next day, Nicole was reportedly arrested at the hospital and charged with child neglect for allowing the child to babysit her younger sibling. 

The Vanderburgh County Department of Child’s Services removed all of Nicole’s children from her care due to the allegations. Her contact with Leon was also limited by DCS while he stayed in the hospital. 

But, the lawsuit alleges, the foster parents got only a few hours of training. It wasn’t enough. Within days the boy needed emergency medical care. But he was returned to the same foster parents. Four months later, he died. 

● From the Missouri Independent: 

A children’s Christian residential facility whose director has spent three years urging Missouri lawmakers to allow unlicensed religious organizations to care for foster children in state custody is being sued in federal court by former residents who allege they were subjected to forced labor and sexual abuse. 

Three lawsuits filed against Show-Me Christian Youth Home allege that the former residents were forced to perform heavy manual labor under threat of food deprivation, isolation or more work. The lawsuits also allege the three plaintiffs, who each spent time in the same Show-Me household between 2007 and 2012, were touched sexually, beaten while naked, surveilled in the shower by their “house father” and punished when they reported the abuse. … 

Show-Me Christian Youth Home, which is based in La Monte, denies the allegations. In Aug. 24 court filings, the organization also argued it cannot be held liable because any alleged harm was caused by employees acting “outside the course and scope of their employment.” It contends the lawsuits violate the First Amendment by asking the court “to rule on or excessively entangle itself in religious doctrine, policy and administration.” 

● You know all those exposés about group homes and “residential treatment” centers? As The Guardian reports, the problem isn’t just limited to the United States.

The San Jose Mercury News is deep in denial about the foster-care panic it did so much to start

How Santa Clara County compares when entries into foster care are compared to the
impoverished child population in each jurisdiction. (Sources here.)

Julia Prodis Sulek is the reporter for the San Jose Mercury News who is one of the two people most responsible for setting off a foster-care panic in Santa Clara County that is among the worst anywhere in America. So it’s no surprise that in her latest story she seems desperate to pretend the panic doesn’t exist.

Granted, just writing a story with the words “foster care panic” in it is a big step up for Sulek, as is quoting people warning about such a panic and including actual comments from a parent whose child was wrongfully taken, and also from that family’s lawyer. She also quoted Prof. Kelley Fong when she cited the study she co-authored finding that increasing foster care does nothing to curb child abuse fatalities. 

That did not stop Sulek from writing the story in a way that implies children weren’t dying in the county before the child welfare agency started curbing needless entries into care. That is, of course, untrue. 

But that implication fits with what I think was the primary purpose of the story: to deny there’s a panic but still be able to say “we covered that” when the issue arises, and then return to fomenting more panic. Decades ago, in his groundbreaking work The Media Monopoly, former Washington Post editor Ben Bagdikian explained how journalists who have strong feelings about a story deal with the side of that story they don't like: They cover it. Prominently. Once. 

So, in her story about a presentation by several state and national experts to the county Board of Supervisors (a presentation that can be seen in full here, starting at about six hours and two minutes in), Sulek cited only part of a presentation by Dr Wendy Wiegmann, project director at UC Berkeley’s California Child Welfare Indicators Project. 

Weigman compared entries into foster care in Santa Clara County to entries in other counties and the state as a whole. But her graphs compared entries only to total child population.  She flagged this very point by also showing a separate table indicating that Santa Clara is, of course, one of the most affluent counties in California. This is crucial because poverty is both a risk factor for actual abuse and also a factor commonly confused with neglect. So the only true apples-to-apples comparison is one that compares entries into foster care to the impoverished child population in each county. 

When you do that, the result practically screams foster-care panic. 

In the index NCCPR publishes concerning America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties, we compare entries both to total child population and impoverished child population. Notice the huge change between them for Santa Clara. 

When you factor in poverty, Santa Clara recently has become very much an outlier. Santa Clara County takes away children at a rate 7% higher than Los Angeles, more than double the rate of New York City and nearly quadruple the rate of metropolitan Chicago. I wish Dr. Wiegmann had presented entries compared to impoverished child population for every California county. The Mercury News should have done just that. But that, of course, would have undermined Sulek’s thesis. 

So we’ve done it for her. Using the same counties Dr. Wiegmann used, we compared entries to the impoverished child population. One county, San Francisco, which has its own long ugly take-the-child-and run history still is higher than Santa Clara. But all the other counties are lower. So is the state average.

                               San Mateo       Contra Costa   California     Alameda  SANTA CLARA      SF

                                     Sources: Entries: California Child Welfare Indicators Project, Poverty: Census Bureau Small Area Income and Poverty Essimtate

Sulek also left out a supervisor’s suggestion that Santa Clara officials look at New Jersey, a state-run system with one of the lowest rates of child abuse deaths in the country. When you factor in poverty, the rate of removal in Santa Clara County is nearly triple the rate of New Jersey. 

Other problems with the story 

● Though the story does include that one example of wrongful removal, it leaves out crucial context. The case involved a mother whose two-year-old autistic son Nathan was taken after 

social workers determined that his mother failed to protect him from witnessing a domestic violence incident when his visiting father allegedly struck his mother — an experience the county said placed Nathan at substantial risk of physical harm. 

Despite the mother’s contention that she was protecting him from that violence and had agreed to a safety plan, her child was placed in foster care one day after Jaxon [Juarez’s] death. He was moved among four foster homes over four months as Jimenez complained about bite marks and other injuries she noticed during her weekly visits. 

What Sulek leaves out, and probably doesn’t know, is that taking away a child under these circumstances is even more traumatic than taking the child when the child has himself been victimized. In fact, it is so traumatic that, as a result of a class-action lawsuit, in one state, New York, it is illegal. The research underlying that decision is summarized here. 

In such cases, there is nothing to stop law enforcement from protecting the child by, say, arresting the abuser and removing him to jail. Instead, panic-motivated removals like this only discourage survivors of domestic violence from coming forward to seek help. 

● Sulek also writes that: 

Supervisor Sylvia Arenas expressed frustration with the recent tragedies, including Jaxon’s death that came after 18 months of state oversight and reforms. 

“We can’t keep up this rate of death in our county,” Arenas said. “I’m not saying foster care is a solution. What I was hoping to hear from you is that there were other strategies that were being used … somewhere where we might be able to mitigate for those deaths. …” 

She didn’t get easy answers. 

But she did get answers; they just weren’t the answers that Arenas, the other prime instigator of the foster-care panic, wanted to hear. 

In fact, many ideas were presented by the panel of experts, but Arenas rushed to dismiss them as too expensive. On the contrary, they all cost less than foster care, and those expenses almost certainly are skyrocketing – due to the foster-care panic. 

It is particularly disturbing to hear Arenas make her claim in the context of the death of Jaxon Juarez – since, as is explained in detail here, the foster-care panic itself may have contributed to Jaxon’s death because, at a crucial turning point, the county didn’t opt for a simple, and very inexpensive, option. 

● That isn’t all that frustrated Arenas. Over and over she tried to get the panel to say one could draw conclusions about systemic failure based on child abuse deaths. But no matter how many ways she asked, and no matter how frustrated she got when she wasn’t told what she wanted to hear, the panel unanimously disagreed. While each is the worst imaginable tragedy, even the panelist most prone to defend foster care, UC Berkeley Prof. Jill Duerr-Berrick, said they also are “outlier events, that are unpredictable and rare.” 

Perhaps this frustrated Sulek, too, since she left it out of her story. 

● Sulek also left out what Supervisor Betty Duong actually said when she bravely discussed what happened to her own family, growing up poor in East San Jose. Sulek said only that Duong “grew up with interventions from social workers for most of her childhood.” 

What Supervisor Duong actually said was: “We were in an environment where poverty was equated with neglect.” 

A massive experiment without informed consent 

● The most unintentionally revealing quote in the story actually came from Prof. Berrick, again the panelist most eager to defend the take-the-child-and-run approach. But in the course of doing so, she said this: 

[W]e don’t know whether [foster care is] a powerful intervention toward the positive or a powerful intervention toward the negative. 

The first thing to note about this is that Berrick is mistaken. There is a mountain of evidence showing that, while foster care is the less detrimental alternative in the horror story cases, for the overwhelming majority of children, those in the typical cases, it is, indeed, “a powerful intervention toward the negative” both because of the high rate of abuse in foster care itself, and the enormous trauma of removal, trauma so great it can lead to early death. 

The evidence is so strong that researchers actually have been able to estimate how many more children will die and become ill because of the panic itself. 

But suppose, hypothetically, Berrick is right and we’re as ignorant as she says we are. 

That means that for decades, arguably centuries, we have been conducting a massive uncontrolled experiment on millions of test subjects without their informed consent – and we have no idea if we’ve actually been harming them. That would be bad enough if the test subjects were adults, but in this experiment, the unwitting, unconsenting test subjects are children. 

If a California pharmaceutical company tested a new drug that way, those performing such an experiment might well be arrested and jailed.

So without intending it, probably without realizing it, what Berrick really is telling us is that “child welfare” as currently practiced in the United States is a fundamentally immoral enterprise. 

Why would anyone want to encourage such an enterprise with a foster-care panic?

Bodycam video reveals the appalling behavior of Florida family police

Street art on a bridge in Pensacola, Florida. (Image from Freekenlee.com)

I don’t know if the underlying decision to remove the child in this case was right, though there is strong cause to doubt it. I do know that everything else the Florida Department of Children and Families did was wrong – and probably far more common than the agency will ever admit. 

Kenlee Zuraff was five years old when she was taken from her mother, Joy, on March 6, 2024. She reportedly was returned in June of this year, after the Florida Department of Children and Families failed in an attempt to take the child from her mother forever. 

I saw the video embedded below when it first was posted publicly last January. I did not write about it at the time because, though the behavior of caseworkers for DCF was atrocious, I could find no objective source of information about the underlying facts of the case. I hoped that a mainstream news outlet would dig into the story. That didn’t happen. 

But in the months since, some state legislators have taken an interest – one of them, State Sen. Jason Pizzo, is even defending the mother in court, pro-bono. That has prompted some good ideas for legislation and some news coverage, though still not enough to get at the underlying facts of the case. 

As you’ll see on the website created by the family’s supporters, the case has gotten a lot of attention on various far-right sites. For someone like me, who comes from what I like to call the “Family Values Left,” that can be a problem. What does one do when the only national news story about the case comes from One America News? (In fact, in this case, their story met all normal journalistic standards.) But I’ll bet that’s made other reporters hesitant. Of course, this may only illustrate a point I’ve made often before: Nothing will get some of my fellow liberals to renounce everything they claim to believe in about due process and civil liberties more quickly than whispering the words “child abuse” in their ears. 

There is analogous hypocrisy among some on the right. This issue creates divisions within both Left and Right, but where some of us have common ground, we’ve come together in a group called Untied Family Advocates. And some of the legislative proposals on the FreeKenlee.com website are similar to some of NCCPR’s own recommendations. 

One thing I do know: After more than two years in foster care, Kenlee finally was returned to her mother. I believe that, had there been no video, that wouldn’t have happened. I believe that, had there been no video, the child’s right to live with her mother would have been taken away forever. 

What we know about the case 

Kenlee has Cystic Fibrosis. According to her mother, Joy, a doctor prescribed a medication that comes with a “black box warning” from the Food and Drug Administration. According to the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, “Black box warnings are added only when substantial clinical data shows the drug can cause severe harm, hospitalization, or death.” Kenlee had had a bad reaction to a similar drug. So Joy said she wanted a second opinion. That, she says, prompted the doctor, a mandated reporter, to call DCF. 

The most detailed account of these underlying events comes from a letter that an adult with Cystic Fibrosis wrote to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, seeking their involvement. (I don’t know if they ever replied.) The letter also describes how often the mere fact that a child has CF puts a family on the family police radar. So add such families to the long list of people who are inherently more vulnerable to having the family police in their lives because of a disability. 

There are elements in the video which I think support this account. On the other hand, Joy’s brother and mother in South Dakota reportedly have defended DCF’s decision. 

What we know for sure 

Kenlee was torn from her mother and sister and placed in a stranger-care home in Jacksonville – six hours away. The distance, of course, made visiting extremely difficult, compounding the trauma of removal. 

When Joy dared to speak out, a judge imposed a gag order. Although court hearings themselves are supposed to be public in Florida, termination of parental rights hearings are an exception. So no reporters could see what was going on, and Joy herself couldn’t tell anyone. That’s just the way family police agencies like it. 

But most damning of all is this video, showing what happened when DCF and Sheriff’s deputies came to take Kenlee. It runs nearly 45 minutes, and it’s hard to watch, so let me call attention to some key moments: 

● The behavior of the DCF workers starting just before five minutes in.

 

● The look on one DCF worker’s face at 11:54 in.

 

● Then watch as the DCF workers rely on the same mother who allegedly is mis-medicating her daughter to explain to them what medications the child is taking and how they should be administered.

 

● See also the DCF employees’ behavior toward Kenlee’s older sister toward the very end of the video.

 

Throughout, they refer to the mother only as “mama,” denying her even the dignity of being called by her own name.

 

As I said, this all took place on March 6, 2024.  Only after the video became public did DCF issue a statement justifying the removal, but adding that 

“the conduct displayed by the Department employees in the video was inappropriate. It failed to demonstrate the level of professionalism and compassion expected in such circumstances, and the Department is addressing this.”  

According to one news account, shortly after the video became public, one of the DCF workers was fired.

 

But while the video only became public in January 2026, surely DCF should have had it for nearly two years. So why did DCF wait until the video became public to address the “inappropriate” behavior? (Yeah, that’s a rhetorical question.) If a worker was fired, was it for the behavior or for forgetting she was on camera?

 

How common is such behavior when no one is recording it? I’m sure most DCF workers don’t behave this way. There are stories from all over the country, equally well-documented, of caseworkers going above and beyond to help keep families together. But this was no aberration either.

 

A grand jury in the same region where this case took place found 12 instances in which DCF workers or subcontractors doing case management were accused by law enforcement of falsifying records. And, of course, there’s no reason to believe DCF workers are better behaved than their private “lead agency” counterparts in Tampa, whose behavior was just exposed by the Tampa Bay Times.

 

Solutions

 

As I noted, the group supporting Kenlee has some good ideas. For starters: require DCF workers to wear body cameras (to which I would add the equivalent of an “exclusionary rule”: if they forget to turn the camera on, or the cameras malfunction, then no information obtained during the unrecorded interviews/inspections could be used in court or in DCF records.)

 

For decades, NCCPR has advocated requiring all interviews to be recorded – with a similar
exclusionary rule. The recommendation goes back so far that originally we spoke of how easy it would be to do this on microcassette tape recorders. Now that bodycams are available, should we take that leap? There are concerns this might intimidate families. But Kenlee’s case illustrates how sometimes recording interviews alone would not be enough. I don’t think DCF ever would have taken action concerning its caseworkers in this case, and chances are, Kenlee still would be in foster care, if not for that bodycam video.

 

They also recommend, as do we, explicitly giving families the right to make recordings of their own, and informing families that they have that right.

 

Kenlee’s supporters also put a lot of emphasis on providing high-quality legal representation for families, something we have long advocated and consider one of the most important ways to curb needless removal of children and other family police abuses.

 

One of the lawmakers supporting Kenlee and her mother, State Sen Don Gaetz, has another excellent idea. As the Tampa Bay Times reports: 

One of Gaetz’s proposed changes would be to have the department secretary, who is appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Florida Senate, review all cases where there is a proposed termination of parental rights. 

In other words, Ms. or Mr. Secretary of DCF: If your agency is going to impose child welfare’s equivalent of the death penalty, you must personally sign off on the execution request. 

Also from the story: 

[Gaetz] also said parents must have due process, and should be able to dispute inaccurate information from the agency without fear of being retaliated against. Gaetz also said the department should not unnecessarily move children hundreds of miles from home. 

Concerning the retaliation issue, the story mentions no specifics. 

But it’s good to see lawmakers begin to make efforts to curb family policing.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending September 1, 2026

● The big news this week includes publication of an outstanding new book. In Making Families, Breaking Families, child welfare’s foremost academic historian, Dr. Mical Raz, brings a scholar’s perspective to the story of the fearmongering and smears that ultimately led Congress to pass the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act. Although the print edition won’t be out until later this month, the electronic edition is available now from Amazon or Barnes and Noble. 

I’m proud that NCCPR and the work of several NCCPR Board Members are cited in discussing the efforts to fight back and set the record straight. The lessons from that time are urgent; there is much to be learned. And while it’s not pleasant to be reminded of how bad things got, it’s encouraging to see how far we’ve come. 

● Reporters for the Tampa Bay Times spent more than a year digging into “hidden foster care” in Florida. Even if you think you know what that term means, and even why it’s so harmful, I guarantee you’ll still be shocked by some of what you’ll read. It is the best – and most horrifying  -- story I’ve seen anywhere in the country on the topic. 

● The Baltimore Banner has a column, and Investigate West has a story that have something in common: Each illustrates the confusion of poverty with neglect. I have a blog post about it with links to both stories. 

● And while both Maryland and Oregon are throwing away money on makeshift placements and/or institutions, The Imprint reports that California is moving in a better direction: bolstering “wraparound” services. The story does an excellent job of answering a question I get all the time: Yes, but what is wraparound anyway? 

● You’d think it’s kind of obvious, but, The Imprint reports, the federal government has sent out guidance to the states reminding them that, when an adoption fails, they are not supposed to keep paying subsidies to adoptive parents who aren’t adoptive parents anymore. And states can require paperwork from those parents documenting that they are, in fact, still the adoptive parents.

In this week’s reminder that the horror stories go in all directions: 

● From The Marshall Project: 

The chief executive of one of Ohio’s largest residential treatment centers for youth is accused of driving nearly three hours to meet someone for sex whom he believed was a 14-year-old girl. Instead, he met a police officer, according to police and court documents.